Protest follows MLK convocation

Students hold hands in protest after the MLK convocation outside Harbach.

Toward the end of Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. convocation, faint chants were audible from inside Harbach. Outside in CFA, around ten to 20 students repeatedly chanted the words “Black Lives Matter.”

Students, all dressed in black, laid on the floor for four and a half minutes, symbolizing the four and a half hours Michael Brown was left in the street after the unarmed teenager was fatally shot in August in Ferguson, Mo.

“We were concerned the administration would shut us down,” senior Yoseph Willis said following the protest.

He said that the main point of the protest was to express solidarity. “We’ve had tough experiences here — I’ve had people say racist stuff to me. We know Knox can do better, and we want administration to openly express solidarity.”

Ideally, students will organize a monthly all-black space to talk about being a student at Knox.

Kate Mishkin is a senior majoring in English literature and minoring in journalism. She started working for TKS as a freshman and subsequently served as managing editor, co-news editor and co-mosaic editor. Kate is the recipient of four awards from the Illinois College Press Association for news and feature stories and one award from the Associated Collegiate Press. She won the Theodore Hazen Kimble Prize in 2015 and 2014 and the Ida M. Tarbell Prize in Investigate Journalism in 2014. She has interned at FILTER Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and WGIL radio and the Virginian-Pilot.